Jon Fosse and the Continuing Experiment

In my middle age, I have grown a real taste… may I say even a delight… when artists experiment with the fabric of their art form. For writing, well, that form comes in words and rhetorical structures with sentences. As I have said many a blog, writing is simply placing one word next to another (left to right/top to bottom), building paragraphs one after the other in order to paint word pictures in the reader’s imagination as she decodes the syntax. The theater of the mind.

Fosse is a Norwegian writer who just won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He has been pumping out novels and plays since the 1980’s. Relatively unheard of in the US, well known in West, and this made me curious because I had never heard of him, even a mention of him. So, I do what I always do when I hear about a great writer winning a great award. I bought a copy of the works. Well, imagine my absolute thrill when I received my copy of Jon Fosse’s Septology I – II The Other Name (translated by Damion Searls). I open to the first page and begin….

Oh! Oh man! Ohohohohohohohohoho! What do we have here, my little beauty! I read from left to right and top to bottom and never is there an end mark (maybe a question mark here and there). I read and read and read… no paragraphs! I read and read and read and page after page after page and soon (all resistance to the text subdued – and brother let me tell you, it was resistance!) I am deeply into the main character’s head, a Joycean dream; a powerful characterization pronounced and incredibly moving, a simple scene of a man driving, thinking as he passes a friend’s house, imagining the alcoholic suffering as he shakes on the couch, imagining his thoughts as he desires a drink… maybe a cigarette, imagines it all and then questions his reason for not stopping, questions his morality, his Christianity, a God that allows suffering… and I’m still reading from left to right/top to bottom… I am with him… I am in him… I am him – resistance gone… no paragraphs, no end marks… and yet I understand it all and am deeply, deeply (profoundly?) moved.

There is a reason great artists are not understood in their lifetime. There is a reason great art sustains the test of time. The techniques are those that try to break the medium, pull back, back, back, just so… yes, that’s it… this is the way to tell this story. A handful of sales, a handful of readers, but a work that will speak into the future… for as long as humans open books.